Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan's Sex Scenes in 'Ammonite' Should Change How We Talk About Gay Love in Film - The Daily Beast

The Toronto International Film Festival is the annual hallmark of Oscar season that telegraphs what movies you’ll care about, or at the very least watch win dozens of awards all winter and spring.

It’s the movie you’ve already heard about, the one with the strange title in which Kate Winslet has a lesbian sex scene and is hanging her Oscar hopes on.

It’s a movie that deserves thousands of words of praise for how expertly it captures the emotional volatility of sexual, passionate, imperfect, forbidden love—and also is iconic for its explicit and hot-as-hell gay sex scenes.

In Ammonite, Winslet plays Mary Anning, a pioneering British fossil excavator who lived in the first half of the 1800s. .

But this is, at its core, a film about a searing relationship between two women, though there is no historical basis for that romance, or even the insinuation that Mary was queer. .

One of those is Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), who, while on a tour of the country, makes a point to stop in on Mary and inquire about her work. .

Lee transports you, even if your screening of the film is on a laptop in lieu of a major film festival premiere.

The Big Scene in Ammonite is Mary and Charlotte’s transformative sex.

So how do you talk about Ammonite, the movie in which Academy Award-winning actress Kate Winslet makes headlines sight-unseen for a sex scene with Prestige It Girl Saoirse Ronan on camera, without being reductive? .

Still, when there’s a movie like this that features major celebrities in same-sex love scenes, there’s always an effort to set the discourse about how it was done and why it’s important. .

As such, there will be comparisons to how not just the scene, but the entire arc, compares to recent films like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Blue Is the Warmest Color, or, in the genre of Oscar-winners playing lesbians, Carol.

It’s because films like this still are not allowed to stand on their own.

But when the connection between Mary and Charlotte is finally forged, the film is transcendent

Kate Winslet is going to catapult to a Best Actress Oscars conversation by virtue of the fact that she’s Kate Winslet in a lesbian movie that premiered at TIFF

Winslet gave a fascinating quote to Vanity Fair when talking about the film: “I’m learning a good deal about same-sex relationships and how they’re perceived and debated because of Ammonite and because the relationship between these two female characters isn’t hidden.”

It’s love that’s allowed to be love